La Jetée
Memory is a fragment of time. One can not distinguish memory from every day moments but only when they become memorable since they leave scars.
The specific project refers to a series of photographic shots, photo-roman, which illustrate the moment of someone’s waking up. Based on Chris Marker’s film, La Jetée, I tried to create a narrative flow of pictures, text and sound that will depict the story of a man who is obsessively consumed by the image of a woman with whom he once lived and he can not escape from her memory.
When one wakes up in the morning, one attempts to balance himself among three time periods. One is past time, since he thinks about the previous night, the previous day, previous relationships; another one is the real time since he indirectly realizes he has woken up and lastly, the future time during which he processes his next move. The moments that have passed occasionally function as a safe shelter for us protecting us from the unknown that the future offers. We are seeking unconsciously to return there where we felt more carefree and more pure as beings. Love, eros, is the only power that allows us to escape the merciless time and space.
The story consists of three thematic units that refer to time as such. The first one shows a man with whom there is a woman and this concerns pas time. There are interchanges between the face of the man and far away places, which have the intense presence of a shadow (castles, the shadow concerns the memory of the woman within space/ ambiguous images moving between the real and the imaginary). The second unit concerns reality (although we have here elements of fiction) and it has got to do with a state of mind where the woman exists (here, the statues function in a symbolic way as a notional model but also nude not only physically but also mentally). Photographic alternations take place between the woman’s face, the sea and moving pictures. Finally, the third unit is the moment of the opening of the eyes; he has woken up and it is at that moment that between the gazes of the two people, there is nothing but an illusion of immortality in future time. It ends with the picture of the man who walks towards the sea. It would be interesting to try to visualize the game of memory during moments of intense emotional value.
The book will consist of photos, taken by me as well as some texts, taken by the script of the film La Jetée.
At the beginning of the book, there will be a cd in which the sound track of the film will be included. The reader is required to listen to the music of the cd while reading the book. The simultaneous presence of sound and image is necessary for a deeper understanding of the book. This is an attempt to understand the way that our memory functions meaning our ontological doom that convicts us in such a way so we are unable to escape from time itself.
The book was printed in Porto in April 2015
in the printing office Fotomecânica Molografica S.A.
for a limited number of prints.
Acknowledgements to Elias Marques.
